Posts in Category: Blogging

Travel photography is a subcategory of photography involving recording of an area’s scenery, people, cultures and tradition, customs and history. According to The Photographic Society of America, a travel photo as an image that expresses the feeling or the sensation of a time and place, portrays a land, its people, or a culture in its natural state, and has no actual geographical limitations.

The thing about travel photography is that it is taken with equal enthusiasm by amateurs as well as by professionals. There are obviously professionals who travel all around the world and take amazing photographs. Commercial travel photography provides imagery for the $1 trillion global tourism industry. It might include photographing destination hotels and resorts, tourist attractions, scenery, adventures in the great outdoors, home events, cultures such as different festivals and customs. Images are of great use in advertising, merchandising, used in blogs and travel journals and print sales. With such a huge variety of subject matter and also a pretty big market for commercial selling of these photographs, travel photographers require skills across all photographic disciplines such as portraiture, landscape, architectural reportage, and wildlife and event photography.

Travel photography is not like other genres like fashion, product, or food photography in that it is still an underestimated and relatively less monetized part, though the obstacles faced by travel photographers are actually more than some of the genres where the light and other shooting conditions may be up to oneself and not at the mercy of nature.

This genre of photography entails shooting a wide variety of thongs under varied available conditions like low light photography indoors, accessible ambient light photography for exteriors of buildings and monuments, shooting on the streets where sometimes conditions may be hostile though such is likely to be classifies as photojournalism; capturing moments which rarely recur, capturing the magic of light while shooting landscapes and also capturing natural events that are inaccessible to a huge part of the world such as Aurora Borealis or an erupting volcano.

The biggest advantage of travel photography is no doubt the travel. It is a pleasure and no doubt a huge privilege to be able to travel to different stunning locations. Something that is quite rare and very few in the world are lucky enough to be so included. To be able to go and experience not only the scenic beauty of the place but have the good fortune to mix with the people, learn their road of life and be able to hold it up in photographs. It is a truly rewarding and amazing job.

On the other hand, if one is not tied up with publications such as National Geographic one might have trouble having enough finances to go along with their travels though freelancing in this profession has been abundant. With the increase of social media it bring sellers and buyers of such outstanding photographs closer together such that they interact more and this sector of photography can only grow bigger in the coming years.

Is photography going to die in 2017?

A lot of people think that photography as an art and science reached its peak long ago, and that its end draws near. Think about it, the beginning of photography was around two hundred years ago, when a person first tried to combine some principles of science in order to capture a photo. And from then on photography has blossomed into a fully blown phenomenon that captivates people from all around the world.

There have been incredible advances and developments in the field of photography, starting from the creation of technologically advanced cameras that not one single person that lived around 50 years ago, in their right mind would think that they would someday be created. Then you have the latest advances in the science on how a picture should be taken in order to provide the best effects. All in all, it seems that photography has indeed reached the zenith, and is about to start falling off from the grace of mankind.

But is all this true?

The answer to this question: No.

When you think about it, the name of this article should be the following: Who in their right mind would think that photography is going to die in 2017? The fact of the matter is that even though there have been incredible advances in the field of photography recently, and even though it seems that the whole thing is about to crash – there’s still a long way to go. Even as we speak scientists and photographers are figuring out new principles of photography that will make the top level photographical principles of 2016 seem like child’s play. Even as we speak scientists and photographers are creating new models of cameras that will make the cameras of 2016 look old and outdated. So, there’s indeed a lot to look forward to in the world of photography.

But go back a bit, back to the core of the entire matter. Why are humans so drawn towards photography? Why photos are a big part in our day to day life? Why we like to spend hours on end on the social network such as Facebook and Instagram whose sole existence revolves around photo sharing? It may be a deep philosophical subject, but we believe that photos are held in high esteem because they do the improbable – they capture a flash of life itself. A picture is a thousand words, and just by looking at a photography you may extract volumes of information.

But on top of all of this existentialist philosophical stuff, we mustn’t forget the crucial most important element that makes photography so powerful and popular – taking photos is fun! And so is seeing them! People have been passionate photography hobbyist ever since the first hand held camera was invented, and the hobby of photography has blasted in our day to day lives with the advent of cellphone cameras, so nowadays everyone can snap high quality pictures just by using their cellphones.

And the trends of photography are ever-changing and always ephemeral. What is popular in 2016 as a trend in photography, will be replaced by something new. For example, the past few years we have had the trend of taking photos of a person during exercise. Since most people really respect the dedication that goes into having a regular exercise regime, it’s easy to think of the reasons why exercise photography is a popular trend. But tomorrow maybe this won’t be the case. Perhaps the trend of exercise photography will die out and people will now think that whoever takes a photo of themselves while exercising, must be really, really vain and concerned with other people’s approval of them. This is a real possibility, and it’s been known to happen to some other photography trends.

And the prognosis of the trends of 2017 photography are that the photos where people are aware that they are in front of a camera, and where they are posing – are falling out of favor. In their place are coming the spontaneous, in-the-moment photos that you take when someone isn’t looking at you and doesn’t know that you’re taking the photo. If you think about it, none of these two trends are inherently good or bad in and of themselves, it’s just how the time goes and people become fed up with a certain trend, and want to see something new every once in a while.

So, the answer, in short, is No, photography won’t die out in 2017. If anything, it’s going to gain even higher popularity among the population of the world, especially as high quality cameras are becoming available even to less wealthy people, and most anyone could buy a cheap, but powerful camera, if they want to. So, don’t worry in the slightest, photography has been with us for more than two centuries, and it’s extremely likely that it will be with us for a long, long time.